Tag: alison espach
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Extinction of Irena Rey vs. Margo’s Got Money Troubles/The Wedding People
The official match-up this round is an easy choice for me. I found the formal experimentation of Margo’s Got Money Troubles to be intrusive and irritating while the formal experimentation of The Extinction of Irena Rey seemed delightful to me. It seems an easy choice to advance The Extinction of Irena Rey. Meanwhile in a parallel universe If…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Liars/The Wedding People vs. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The one match of the quarterfinals where I did not successfully choose the matchup, thanks to Liars getting the nod over The Wedding People. So in the real-life matchup, we have Liars over Margo’s Got Money Troubles and while Margo has occasional issues with its structure, it at least didn’t feel like a giant lump of undigested autobiography like Liars did,…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Liars/The Wedding People vs. The Book of George
Today brings the first of the counterfactual matchups in my commentary since Hannah Pearl Utt inexplicably chose Liars to advance from the play-in round. So let me talk about The Book of George. This book hits a lot of the same sort of notes that Liars does from a hapless man failing at relationships. But unlike Liars, the focus…
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Play-In Round
This year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at…
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My favorite reads of 2024
Somehow, this year, I managed to blow past my previous records for numbers of books read and end the year with 154 books read. As usual, a full accounting of the books is at Goodreads. My favorite books of the year, in no particular order. The Wedding People by Alison Espach. This starts out seeming…